It's no secret that in the past 30 years, Californians have become more tolerant of gay rights, as have millions of other Americans. But in California, according to data reported last Friday at a conference of pollsters by Mark DiCamillo of the Field Poll, the change of attitude was almost entirely among Democrats and independents.

Republicans are almost exactly where they were in 1977.

So does that just make the GOP a party of genetically slow learners, a claque so rigid, insular and detached from changes in the real world that they either don't know or don't care? Their extortionate demands in the face of what the governor, once their hero, called the looming "financial Armageddon," in the current budget crisis make that a credible theory.

The more plausible explanation is that these aren't the Republicans of 1977. They aren't moderates like Bob Monagan, Bill Bagley, Ken Maddy or Pete Wilson, or pragmatists like Ronald Reagan, who in 1967 approved a major tax increase to resolve a prior budget crisis.

Today's GOP is a very different party, a hard-line group of self-insulated ideologues, more like a political cult than like an inclusive party that stretches its core principles to be inviting to people at or beyond that core.

The biggest increase in voter registration has been among independents, who now represent 20 percent of California's electorate. Democrats and Republicans have both lost market share. Both have been driven, or driven themselves toward the ideological margins.

The self-marginalization has been far greater among Republicans, who exclude independent voters from their primaries, who have made no effort to reach out to California's fast-growing minorities, Latinos especially, or for that matter to women. Many voters who would once have been Republicans, and a lot who probably were, are now independents and even Democrats. As Casey Stengel said, you can look it up.

Given all that, it's easier to understand Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines' extortionate demand last week that before they'll talk about tax increases, which every reasonable analyst knows are urgent if the state isn't to go over a financial cliff, the governor and Democrats have to meet a list of conditions most of which would do nothing to resolve the crisis.

The list: Loosen worker protections on overtime pay and meal breaks; impose permanent budget caps that would create a new cliff for the state's schools and universities; allow more pollution (defined as "business-friendly environmental regulations") and more.

And even if those conditions were met, there'd be no guarantee of flexibility. All this from a man who was educated in a public university supported by people who were willing to invest in California's future.

Villines, trying to sound reasonable, said his party feels just as strongly about revenue increases as Democrats do about budget cuts. But Democrats have already agreed to severe reductions in services. They'd probably agree to an unwise and dangerous level of additional cuts if Republicans gave them a little cover.

Republicans took great umbrage to the governor's swipe at his fellow Republicans last week. "You can't go with a list like (Villines)," the governor said in answer to a press conference question, "and say if you commit to those things and if you're willing to make those changes, then we are willing to talk about revenue increases. That is not the way you negotiate."

It was so gentle that it didn't get much attention outside the building in which it was made, but in the tight little island of the Capitol – and particularly on the even tighter island of legislative Republicans – it was immediately turned into yet another reason why the petulant GOP leadership wouldn't do anything but hold the state hostage.

The rising water is lapping at their feet, and you have to feel for their desperate search for a face-saver that would allow them to retreat to higher ground. The tone, though not the contents of the demands issued last week, made that clear: Give us something that would allow us to be reasonable. No wonder the governor said it was a kindergarten.

It's immediately catastrophic on two grounds. The first is obvious, as almost all Californians must know by now: Every additional hour of delay in confronting the budget crisis increases the deficit by thousands of dollars; the second is that, if met, the GOP's demands would do nothing to address the crisis; some would make things worse in the future.

But for California's future, the determined self-isolation and intransigence of the GOP, made possible largely by the leverage it gets from California's anomalous undemocratic two-thirds budget threshold, may be even more dangerous.

The state desperately needs a responsible, engaged, conservative party. Such a party would also make the majority Democrats more moderate and responsible. At the moment, it doesn't have one.